Course Dates: October 14 – 18, 2019
In this popular program, you will acquire the practical skills and techniques for facilitating negotiations between disputing parties. From family and employment matters to public policy and business disagreements, you will discover effective ways to settle differences and mediate disputes across a variety of contexts.
This program will provide you … Read More

Program on Negotiation faculty member and Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler brings you a new, next-generation approach to negotiation.
Michael Wheeler’s new book, The Art of Negotiation, demonstrates that the best negotiators are adept at managing chaos and uncertainty and rarely trap themselves with rigid plans and entrenched positions. Understanding that negotiation is a process … Read More

Strictly limited to 60 participants who have completed a prior course in negotiation, this first-of-its-kind program offers unprecedented access to experts from Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—all of whom are committed to delivering a transformational learning experience. By working closely with them, you will:
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When figuring out how to deal with cultural differences in negotiation, it helps to consider the cultural prototypes represented at the bargaining table—but individual differences count, as well.
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This fine blend of Harvard scholarship and seasoned judgment is really two books in one. The first develops a sophisticated approach to negotiation for executives, attorneys, diplomats – indeed, for anyone who bargains or studies its challenges. The second offers a new and compelling vision of the successful manager: as a strong, often subtle negotiator, … Read More

The prospect of boosting our negotiation skills can be so overwhelming that we often delay taking the necessary steps we can follow to improve, such as taking time to prepare thoroughly. The following five guidelines will help you break this daunting task into a series of manageable—and often essential—strategies.
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When dealing with difficult people, we tend to expect them to be rigid negotiators who will walk away if they don’t get everything they want. But a gruff demeanor may not necessarily translate into a hard-nosed negotiating style.
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Technology is a pervasive feature of modern life, providing countless benefits ranging from new cancer treatments to smart phones. Technology can also be a source of disruption and is at the root of many disputes. Parties frequently disagree on the likely costs and benefits associated with the adoption of new technologies. They feud over such … Read More

What can business negotiators learn from current negotiations in the news? Quite a bit, according to the dozens of negotiation experts who contributed to the January 2019 special issue of the Negotiation Journal, entitled “Negotiation and Conflict Resolution in the Age of Trump.”
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Businesspeople who are looking for effective negotiation strategies often confront a dizzying array of advice. It can be useful to take a step back and categorize these strategies into various types of negotiation tactics. Highlighting the benefits of negotiation in business, the following five types of negotiation tactics can help you think more broadly about … Read More

Before and during your negotiation, think about who you’ve chosen as a reference group against which you measure yourself. Did you select the group purely to enhance your own status, or did you try to make a more appropriate comparison? What are your negotiation skills in business communication?
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To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the United States under President Barack Obama had bungled one negotiation after another on the global stage due to an inability to stand firm and take tough stances on key issues when engaging in difficult conversations.
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While most negotiation research aims to sharpen individual managers’ skills, there is growing scholarly and professional interest in an organizational approach to negotiation.A systemic perspective evaluates the training, authority, procedures, and resources that manager need to improve their companies’ “return on negotiation,” as consultant Danny Ertel puts it. Looking at negotiations broadly reveals important design … Read More

Even those who effectively engage in an integrative negotiations or mutual-gains approach to negotiation, a bargaining scenario in which parties work together to meet interests and maximize value creation during the negotiation process, can be stymied by the task of dividing up a seemingly fixed pie of resources, such as budgets, revenue, and time.
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The ladder of inference is a model of decision making behavior originally developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schoen and elaborated upon in the context of negotiation by Program on Negotiation co-founder Bruce Patton in his book Difficult Conversations, co-authored with fellow Program on Negotiation faculty members Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. The model describes … Read More

Professor Guhan Subramanian ’98 will be the new chair of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School. Subramanian holds appointments at both Harvard Law School, where he is the Joseph H. Flom Professor of Law and Business, and Harvard Business School, where he is the H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law. As chair of PON, he … Read More

In negotiation courses, trainees learn effective management strategies for their negotiations and how to find new negotiation opportunities at the bargaining table. Using an example from the city of Denver, Ben Markus reports for NPR’s Weekend Edition that Colorado’s recent legalization of marijuana has posed challenges to local jurisdictions in enforcing current federal law which … Read More

A standoff between Democrat President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans in 2012 focused attention on the negotiation styles employed by the two parties as they sought to secure their interests while also working toward the resolution of a budgetary battle.
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In negotiations, strong, adaptive leadership styles are often learned and perfected away from the table. Lena Dunham is a hugely successful actor, writer, and director, but the creator of the HBO hit show “Girls,” is also a formidable negotiator.
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Aggressive tactics and hard-bargaining strategies may, at face value, provide a roadmap to success at the bargaining table but, as the Washington Post’s Kelly Johnson discovered in her interview with Program on Negotiation faculty member Michael Wheeler, adaptability to ever-changing circumstances is essential for the “dynamic” negotiations one encounters in everyday life.
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Sometimes in negotiation, we bargain less as the equal of our counterpart than as a supplicant, hands outstretched in the hope that the other party will help us stay afloat. Negotiating as the weaker party requires a special set of skills as we strive to advocate for our needs without irritating the other party into … Read More

Q: I lead a team of approximately 50 lawyers in the in-house legal department of a Fortune 500 company. As our team gets larger, reflecting the company’s growth, I’d like to install quality-control measures to ensure that all our attorneys are effectively negotiating settlements when appropriate and taking cases to trial when not. What are … Read More

As Joe Biden tells it, he never wanted to be vice president.
When Barack Obama asked him to consider being vetted as his running mate, Biden declined. Traditionally, the vice presidency was a largely ceremonial position removed from the center of power. Though recent VPs, most notably Dick Cheney, had changed that, Biden, as a longtime … Read More

The story, related by an anonymous job candidate on a blog called the Philosophy Smoker, went viral. According to the job candidate, referred to only as “W,” the philosophy department of Nazareth College, a small liberal-arts college in Rochester, New York, offered her a tenure-track position following a round of interviews. W said she responded … Read More

In July 2012, Google executive Marissa Mayer, a top contender for the position of CEO of Yahoo, had a dazzling interview with the struggling Internet company’s board of directors. Mayer presented a detailed, impressive plan to lead each sector of Yahoo’s business, and she skillfully reassured board members about her perceived weaknesses, reports Bethany McLean … Read More

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School held a panel discussion following a screening of My Neighborhood, a Just Vision documentary. The podcast is now available.
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This presentation by Karen Lee Bar-Sinai and Prof. Robert Mnookin is the fourth seminar exploring the role of urban planning in negotiation, co-sponsored by the Middle East Negotiation Initiative (MENI) at the Program on Negotiation and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
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The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School are pleased to present a screening of “My Neighborhood,” a new Just Vision documentary. A panel discussion will be held after the screening with Julia Bacha, director/producer of My Neighbourhood.
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Yaakov Katz, a correspondent for The Jerusalem Post and Jane’s Defence Weekly, and Prof. Robert Mnookin, the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, will discuss Unilateral Initiatives in the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict.
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In a series of studies, Joshua M.Ackerman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Christopher C. Nocera of Harvard University, and John A. Bargh of Yale University explored how the feel of physical objects could arbitrarily be influencing our choices without our knowledge.
In one study, the researchers asked passersby to evaluate a job candidate by reviewing … Read More

In response to recent power struggles and stand-offs in Congress, most notably House Speaker John Boehner’s dare to the Senate to not return to Washington to negotiate with House Republicans, National Journal interviewed Harvard law professor Robert C. Bordone to get his opinion on Congress’s approach to negotiation.
When asked to give his estimation of Congress’s … Read More

Negotiation skills are a critical, although often overlooked, aspect of water management, especially in situations where water crosses boundaries. Conflicts arise when water is managed as a fixed or scarce resource, and allocated in a way that assumes some parties will gain while others lose. In a recent blog post, Professor Lawrence Susskind examines … Read More

At first glance, Knocking is about Jehovah’s Witnesses, the door-to-door proselytizers we like to hide from. But there’s a bigger story as the film asks whether they are a necessary annoyance in a free society. What if you wanted to speak, publish, worship or live as you choose but belonged to the marginalized group of … Read More

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Preparing for Negotiation

Understanding how to arrange the meeting space is a key aspect of preparing for negotiation. In this video, Professor Guhan Subramanian discusses a real world example of how seating arrangements can influence a negotiator’s success. This discussion was held at the 3 day executive education workshop for senior executives at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Guhan Subramanian is the Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School.